One of the little known
realities of twentieth century history is the role played by Hitler's
Nazi regime in kindling the contemporary conflagration known as the
Global War On Terror.

With the incessant and very effective propaganda war being waged by the
Islamo-fascist movement in the media and the Internet, many of the
deeper underlying issues in this conflict are being obscured,
intentionally so.

When US analyst Stephen Schwartz coined the term Islamo-fascism to
describe Al Qaeda, its multitude of franchises, and the Tehran regime,
he elicited considerable argument. To date academic analysts and
scholars remain divided on the use of this term. This is unfortunate
insofar as these regimes/movements and the underpinning methodology of
public control are clearly fascist in every respect, once the veneer of
fundamentalist Islamic propaganda is stripped away. Schwartz cites his
own definition as 'Islamofascism refers to use of the faith of Islam as
a cover for totalitarian ideology'.

Every revolutionary warfare movement needs cannon fodder, and the
primary cannon fodder are disaffected people. The root of the Jihadist
movement underpinning Al Qaeda is the progressive economic and
political decline of the Islamic world, relative to the industrialised
world.

While the Jihadist view is that this is a consequence of Western
oppression, the reality is far simpler. Nearly all of these nations
were recipients of generous economic and military aid during the Cold
War, as they sold their allegiance to the West or the Soviets since the
beginning of the Cold War. With the fall of the Soviet Union, that
source of external subsidy vanished overnight, and they had to compete
in an increasingly globalised and active world economy. With little or
no industrial base, and excluding the handful of nations with
significant petrochemical wealth, most of these nations were not viable
economically. This was further exacerbated by arcane legal systems,
often almost medieval, poor levels of public education, poor governance
and dysfunctional public institutions, and often absolutist or
authoritarian governments. Nation states in this condition cannot
compete in a modern global economy, and the result was increasing
poverty, unemployment, and a sense of helplessness.

These are
conditions no different from those which spawned the Bolshevik
revolution, and the rise of Hitler's National Socialist German Worker's
Party (NSDAP). The only missing ingredient was a shared ideology which
provides a supporting belief system to unify recruits. Fundamentalist
Islam with its anti-Western, anti-Jewish and anti-wealth belief system
was that ideology, and the result is what we see today.

Another way of looking at this problem is that only Turkey and Iran had
made a genuine transition from the medieval form of governance where
church and state were linked, and the genuine separation of Church and
State, as occurred in the West during the reformation period centuries
ago, only remains in Turkey, since Iran's secular regime collapsed. As
a result of this, political meddling by clerics remains at the root of
the problems we see today in the Islamic world.

By far the most active in this respect have been Wahhabi
fundamentalists, a deeply conservative and extreme sect in Sunni Islam,
which for a variety of historical accidents became the official state
religion of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabist clerics receive generous state
subsidies, for both domestic activities and missionary activities on a
global scale. Wahhabism is the ideology underpinning Al Qaeda, and the
defunct Taliban state which was crushed in Operation Enduring Freedom.

The Islamic
nations of the world had considerable exposure during the Cold War to
Soviet revolutionary warfare doctrine, which was standard curriculum
material for any students sent to Soviet and other Warsaw Pact nation
universities to gain free undergraduate and postgraduate education.
Suffice to say, classics like Lenin's Gosudarstvo i Revolutsia (The
State and the Revolution) were compulsory reading. To this pool of
sociopathic knowledge infused across Islamic nations must also be added
the extensive training in insurgency techniques provided by US and UK
special forces and intelligence instructors during the 1980s Afghan war
of liberation against the Soviets. Therefore the technique of
destabilising governments and political institutions by sustained
insurgency is well understood across the Islamic world, and
considerable study material especially of Soviet origin remains
available.

Having cannon fodder in the form of a materially disadvantaged and
disaffected populace, a ex-Soviet cookbook for practising insurgency,
and an ideological framework of Wahhabism are essential ingredients for
mayhem, but not enough to construct a genuinely effective globalised
insurgency. The glue which is needed to hold these together is a
developed ideological doctrine and propaganda framework.

The Soviet
model was never going to be a candidate in this environment, since too
much of Soviet propaganda technique was centred on exploiting class
divisions in industrialised societies, and too much was centred in
ideas like 'Pan-Slavism' and 'internationalism'. The 'ideal' communist
had to fervently believe in the brotherhood of all men, and accept that
only class enemies were evil, and that people of any nationality could
be liberated and brought into the fold given enough indoctrination. A
revolutionary Islamic movement needed an ideological doctrine and
propaganda framework which was chauvinistic in cultural values, and
racist in focussing hatred on non-Islamic nations or groups, especially
Jews.

The ideal model for this environment is of course the destructive
creation of Dr Joseph Goebbels, Reich Propaganda Minister, and chief
ideologue of Hitler's NSDAP, the Nazi propaganda machine and its
associated doctrine and technique.

Contemporary Western popular culture, exemplified by much of what
Hollywood has produced on the topic, tends to portray the Nazis either
as buffoons, or caricatures of evil. This is an unfortunate
simplification of the truly destructive nature of the Nazi regime, and
its clever use of a wide range of techniques designed to deeply seduce
its followers. It is worth observing that the popularity of Nazi
ideology in fringe groups in Western nations, despite the demonstrable
moral and social bankruptcy of Nazism, has if anything grown over
recent decades.

The Nazi
model was multi-pronged, essentially populist, and was carefully
constructed to provide paths via which the socially disadvantaged or
ambitious individual could advance. A central theme of the Nazi
cultural construct was that those who would take the initiative
individually, in promoting Nazi agendas or performing a community
service (of a variety approved by the regime) would be rapidly
promoted. Good ideas and the willingness to invest effort in them were
rapidly rewarded. In a socially strongly stratified and class
structured pre-Nazi Germany, the Nazis presented opportunities for
upward social mobility unseen until then. Individuals who jumped on the
Nazi bandwagon, if industrious in their pursuits, could rise socially
at a speed unseen until then in Germany. Cinematographer Leni
Riefenstahl and aviatrix Hanna Reitsch were classical examples.

One byproduct of this arrangement was an enormous burst of
technological, industrial and social welfare innovation in Germany,
during the 1930s. Talent which aligned with the Nazis was rewarded
generously, the quid pro quo being complete subservience to the
ideological belief system of the regime. The Nazis for instance
actively recruited PhD graduates in a wide range of disciplines to
staff their bureaucracies and security apparatus. It is a little known
fact that much of the leadership staff of the SS security apparatus
held doctorates from leading German universities.

Another key
element of the Nazi model was a focus on social welfare, hitherto
unseen in developed nations, and a mechanism designed to completely
seduce the 'blue collar' sections of German society. This extended from
the use of youth organisations to perform community service, to the
introduction of innovative health insurance. Which citizen could not
admire a movement which would organise idle teenagers to help fix a
pensioner's dilapidated residence, or clean up the littered town square?

The Nazis perfected the model of complete ideological seduction of the
populace, in a manner the Soviets never mastered, despite no less
intensive effort. This is why German troops fought with such blind
fanaticism during the latter phase of the Second World War – most truly
believed, en masse, in the regime and its view of the world.

A key tenet of Nazi propaganda was to attribute all misfortunes
experienced by Germany to influence or conspiracy of others. Therefore
German humiliation, misery and poverty in the post Great War Weimar
republic, and depression era, were attributed to the Western powers, a
global Jewish conspiracy, and the subversive influence of the Nazi's
primary ideological competitor, the Soviet led communists. In the Nazi
view of the world, Germans were deemed to be perfect, and all
misfortune the fault of others, who had to be fought and ultimately
exterminated. The Holocaust, and other mass murder effected against
opponents of the regime across Europe were the manifestation of this
deeply indoctrinated belief.

Readers who
have followed the rise of Islamo-fascist political and revolutionary
movements across the Islamic world over recent years will note the
striking similarities in social ideology, political doctrine,
propaganda and the exploitation of social inequality, in comparison
with the Nazi model.

Is is similarity a coincidence, or is there a deeper connection
involved?

There is ample evidence to show that during the latter decade of the
Nazi regime, and following the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945,
elements of Nazi ideology found their way into the Middle East. There
is a good case to be made that initially, anti-Semitism was at the root
of this migration of ideas, but later, other aspects of Nazi model
became assimilated.

The connections between the radical 'political Islam' movement and
Hitler's regime now span eight decades, and most recently involve an
ongoing dialogue between neo-Nazi organisations and 'political Islam'
centred organisations.

The roots of current 'political Islam' and its Islamo-fascist ideology
lie in the 1920s, when Ataturk secularised Turkey after the fall of the
Ottoman regime, and dumped the idea of an Islamic caliphate which
spanned the globe. Egyptian Hassan al-Banna, by occupation a
schoolteacher, founded Al Ikhwan Al Muslimun (The Muslim Brotherhood)
in 1928, a radical revolutionary movement centred in fundamentalist
Islam as an ideological model.

The
Brotherhood followed the pattern of European revolutionary movements,
recruiting followers disaffected by colonial rule in the Arab world,
and building up a covert organisation which by some accounts had
hundreds of thousands of followers in Egypt by 1945, and branch offices
across the Middle East. The aims of the Brotherhood were simple –
recreate the 'Golden Age' of Islam by restoring the Caliphate, and
drive the infidel 'kafer' colonialists out of the Islamic world. The
social groupings around mosques, and traditional Islamic welfare
organisations were used as a cover and conduit for financing the
movement. By some accounts, much of the early activity of the
Brotherhood was modelled on the early NSDAP.

By 1948 the Brotherhood had gained such potential, that it prepared a
coup against the Egyptian monarchy, but was disbanded by the Egyptian
government. It responded by assassinating the Prime Minister, the
regime in turn killing its leader Hassan al-Banna. The ascendancy of
Nasser's national socialist regime then saw a sustained campaign by the
government to destroy the Brotherhood, one which has continued to this
very day. One of the casualties of the this campaign was al-Banna's
successor, Sayyid Qutb, hanged in 1966.

Qutb is
often regarded as the father of modern Islamo-fascism, as he fused
fundamentalist Islamic ideology with the Nazi propaganda model, his
stated aim being to produce a movement which rivalled Nazism in the
West and Communism in the East. To creat this ideological model, Qutb
essentially 'remapped' the Nazi model into a Middle Eastern equivalent,
replacing 'German racial purity' with 'Islamic religious purity', and
adopting the tenets of Nazi anti-Semitism and rejection of Western
capitalism and liberal democracy. Key elements of Nazi propaganda, such
as the ideas of a world Zionist conspiracy, centred in the US, were
rolled into this toxic mix, together with the idea of propagating Islam
by the sword.

A then young follower of Qutb was Ayman al-Zawahiri, more recently
co-founder and deputy leader of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaida, who was
recruited into the Brotherhood during the 1960s. In many respects, the
modern Al Qaeda is a direct offspring of al-Banna's movement.
Al-Zawahiri, like bin Laden, is a dropout from a social elite, he
qualified as a medical practioner, his grandfather was the Grand Imam
of the al-Azhar University, his uncle the first leader of the Arab
League.

Another Islamo-fascist who was inspired by Qutb was a young Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini, later to lead the Iranian revolution which toppled
the Shah, Reza Pahlavi.

The connection with the NSDAP regime in Germany however runs deeper, as
the Nazis did their best to support through finance and advice the
embryonic Islamofascist movements in British ruled Eqypt and Iraq
through the late 1930s and early 1940s. The aim was to destabilise
British rule in these strategically critical colonies. A key player was
the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, implicated in a
1941 coup attempt in Baghdad, and another graduate of the al-Azhar
University. Al-Husseini was extensively involved in anti-British and
anti-Jewish Palestinian unrest during the 1920s and 1930s, and one
source claims he met covertly with representatives of the Nazi SS
intelligence arm during the late 1930s, including Adolf Eichmann, later
a key player in the extermination of European Jews.

Once al
Husseini wore out his welcome with the British, he fled to Germany for
the remainder of World War II, remaining active as a propagandist and
recruiter of Balkan Muslims into the Waffen SS Handschar and Kama
Divisions, used extensively in the latter part of the war, as German
manpower available for combat divisions declined. After the war al
Husseini returned to Egypt, and after being implicated in numerous acts
of political violence was exiled. Yasser Arafat, deceased leader of the
Palestinians, was a nephew of al Husseini.

With the withdrawal of the British and French from their Middle Eastern
colonies after the Second World War, and the formation of Israel, the
Middle East became a hotbed of Arab nationalism, in which the fascist
Baath movement became the dominant player. The Baathists represent yet
another thread of Nazi influence, as they asimilated Nazi propaganda
materials. As secular 'national socialists' they in many respects
represented a closer ideological model to that of the Nazis. Saddam
Hussein's Baathist regime, broken by Coalition forces in 2003, was a
direct descendent of this political movement. Hussein's admiration for
Hitler was well documented.

The
connections between Nazism and Arab fascism were further reinforced
as some Nazi war criminals sought refuge after the war. The best
documented instance is that of SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Alois Brunner,
former commandant of the Drancy concentration camp in Paris, who
eventually settled in Syria during the 1950s. There are claims that in
total several hundred former SS and Gestapo officers eventually found
new homes in the Arab world, these including Gestapo officer Joachim
Däumling, SS Ober-Gruppenfuhrer Oskar Dirlewanger, SS Gruppenfuhrer
Leopold Gleim, and SS Ober-Gruppenfuhrer Heinrich Selimann.

Given the volume of publications which currently exist, connecting
modern Islamo-fascism to the NSDAP regime of the 1930s, and the well
documented activities of al Husseini in Nazi occupied Europe, the
evidence that modern Islamo-fascism has its primary ideological and
doctrinal roots in twentieth century Nazism is overwhelming.

Apologists for Islamo-fascism and 'political Islam' will no doubt
dismiss this material as 'Zionist propaganda', but whether we are
prepared to accept or reject such historical claims, the nearly
identical ideological and doctrinal models used by the Nazis and modern
Islamofascists cannot be explained away so easily. Nor is the adoption
of Nazi symbology such as the straight arm salute used by Hezbollah, or
the wide distribution by Islamo-fascists of anti-semitic tracts such as
the “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, a favourite of Goebbels'
propagandists. There are simply too many threads connecting the two
ideologies to be dismissed easily.

World War Two may well be sixty years behind us, but it is clear that
the poison which almost destroyed the world's democracies then is still
alive and well today.